Dual E5 2670 workstation motherboard recommendation

[dsh]

Glad I'm not the only one experiencing issues with the asrock ep2c602-4l/d16. Was going crazy trying to figure out why I was getting so many random NMI hardware failure BSODs in Windows 10 Pro. Sometimes would be stable for 3 days of heavy use, and sometimes would crash after being booted and idling for only 2 minutes.

Been rock solid since I rolled back to Windows 7 Enterprise.

Really hope they figure out whats going on .

Config:
asrock ep2c602-4l/d16
dual xeon 2670 SR0KX
32 GB ECC, fully tested
2 x 128gb SSD
Gigabyte Geforce 980 ti
1300w EVGA SuperNova PSU

 

[Maffo]

Hi guys,

I am brand new to this forum as I am about to embark on building a dual xeon 2670 / EP asrock ep2c602-4l/d16 setup.
It has been great to read through and see so many success stories on here.

I am just sourcing my parts at the moment and have a few bits on order here in the UK.

I am thinking about buying the intel 750 pcie nvme but I can't see to find any info as to whether I will be able to boot from it.

Has anybody on here tried this or thinking about doing so?

 

[rayofsi]

i think computer mainly starts to crash with asrock motherboard ONLY after asrock intel INF driver install. No random lockups yet without the iNF installed

 

[dsh]

i think computer mainly starts to crash with asrock motherboard ONLY after asrock intel INF driver install. No random lockups yet without the iNF installed

Apologies for my ignorance, but is the INF in relation to the onboard NICs? or is it in relation to the processors? If it is in relation to the network driver, I'm curious if replacing them with another pcie solution would fix the windows 10 issues.

 

[fastrax203]

I was having a lot of stability issues but after disabling any sleep features I stopped getting lock ups especially at idle. I used to get either crashes or hangs when I'd leave the machine idle for....well, I'm not sure how long it would be until it would crash but I'd come back to it hours later and the machine will be just sitting, unresponsive at either the monitor being off and being unable to wake back up or on the screen saver and the controls unresponsive. I disabled all the sleep features and it seems to be fine. However when my son or I decide to play games on it (Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Edition, ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 motherboard w/ dual E5 2670, Sandy Bridge ASRock INF, and newest BIOS) the computer will freeze mid-game and completely crash. No error report b/c it freezes so bad I have to do a forced restart.

From what I've been able to tell this ASRock series of motherboards doesn't play too well with Windows 10 but seems perfectly stable with Windows sub 10 and pretty much any Linux OS. I'm going to post on ASRock Rack's Facebook (they actually reply within 24 hrs) to see if they have any suggestions before I go a different route.

 

[paul inventome]

Just to add some fuel to this. Same motherboard. Win 10 clean install - lots of resets and freezes. Swap SSD and Win 8.1 Pro install, so far so much more stable. It's got to be some serious incompatibility with Win 10.

This is with the Asrock Sandy Bridge INF drivers on their site, that version is dated 2014 i think whereas the latest intel versions are 2016.

The intel ones will error during install, so to me Asrock perhaps has modified the INF for their boards and the version they've got is perhaps not compatible with Win 10. I did contact support to find out what the official Win 10 position is. Not heard back yet.

I haven't disabled sleep, i probably will as well.

If you hear back from them please post here!

thanks
Paul

 

[Bill1950]

If W10 is unstable, why not just install W7 or W8.1 and skip W10 altogether? Didn't the MS announcement indicate that they would support all three O/S's until the same date?

 

[fastrax203]

DX12 in my case. My kids are using in home streaming and the crashes I have usually happen when gaming.

 

[Klee]

Asrock ep2c602-4l/d16 does not like Windows 10, one upgrade from 8.1 and three fresh installs with the same result.

Random hard lockups.

Tried Asrock drivers, Intel drivers off intels website, I even let Windows 10 use the default Microsoft installed drivers. Nothing worked.

Uninstalled every piece of hardware that I could to rule them out still locked up.

Installed Windows 2016 server Datacenter and it worked beautifully. But I went back to Windows 8.1 and it works perfectly.

So Windows 7 , 8.1 and 2016 server are good to go on this motherboard but Windows 10 is not.

 

[fastrax203]

That is the conclusion I'm coming to as well. Makes me a sad panda :/

 

[wildpig1234]

I am getting my S2600CP2J together and i thought mine is picky with hardware. What should i try to run? Win10 ent is working on it great so far.

 

[trumee]

What will the best board for a Linux workstation?

Features necessary to me are S3 sleep and IPMI. The peripherals i need are: Mellanox Connect-X2 EN 10Gbe card, Sound card, USB 3 and USB 2 interfaces, serial port.

 

[wildpig1234]

What will the best board for a Linux workstation?

Features necessary to me are S3 sleep and IPMI. The peripherals i need are: Mellanox Connect-X2 EN 10Gbe card, Sound card, USB 3 and USB 2 interfaces, serial port.

You might want to consider a barebone workstation like lenovo d30 or dell t7600. The reason is that the sleep on s2600 and a lot of these other dual cpu server boards are not as well supported since servers usually have no need to go into s3 sleep. s2600 board does have s3 but it's not the most troublefree or easiest to get going by my experience and a few others. also my kill a watt meter shows 17w usage at sleep in s2600 compared to 3 or 4w with the lenovo d30.

the lenovo d30 has built in usb 3.0 as well as onboard sound so you won't even have to worry about adding on any cards like in the s2600. so far the only usb 3 cards consistently shown working with s2600 is the renesas based ones. I don't have experience with other c602 boards from supermicro or asrock but maybe someone else can add?

Seriously, you should look into the barebone workstations for the reasons i said above.

 

[trumee]

I already have a Phanteks Enthoo pro case and a PSU to use for this build. For expandability reasons i try to stay away from commercial offerings. I am keen to know of Asrock or Supermicro offerings which support my feature list.

 

[wildpig1234]

I already have a Phanteks Enthoo pro case and a PSU to use for this build. For expandability reasons i try to stay away from commercial offerings. I am keen to know of Asrock or Supermicro offerings which support my feature list.

If you talk about number of PCIe slots available for expansion, the D30 and dell T7600 actually would give you more available pcie slots since you would already have to use 2 out of 6 slots for usb 3.0 card and a sound card with the c602 server boards whether as on the dell or lenovo they are included on the MB with the benefit of native usb3.0 support onboard for booting up using the usb 3 ports, which is not availlable unless your usb 3 card has boot up bios. the d30 comes with 4 pcie slots, the dell has 6 pcie slots.

As for C602 based asrock or supermicro I am not aware of any with built in usb 3 and sound. If someone know ones they can add this in?

As i said also earlier, S3 sleep is not widely supported on server based boards due to the reasoning that these do not have need to go into sleep based on their intent server use. A few of the C602 chipset based boards including S2600 does have S3 support. But it's not easy or troublefree to get to work sometimes. I got my S2600 to do S3 sleep but it still uses 17w at sleep compared to d30 at 3w. So something is still amiss?

If you already got the parts to build a server board based workstation, and commited in that direction then you should try anyway, but just know that there will be road bumps...

 

[wildpig1234]

S2600CP supports S3 Sleep with latest BIOS, and operates PCI-E at 3.0 (nVidia card needs a driver patch from nVidia to enable PCI-E 3.0 on X79/C60x boards), also Sandy Bridge-EP is fully certified to run at PCI-E 3.0. I have used the S2600CP4 in my new-ish system for 5 months and it worked flawlessly.

Geforce Gen3 Support On X79 Platform

does not work at all in win 10 pro+ with 9xx or 10xx cards ;(.

Also can you tell me how long does it take your system to enter into sleep? i have the s2600cp2j from natex, and my system takes over a min to enter into sleep, unlike other computers i have that would enter sleep almost instantaneously. Also to wake, i have to press the power buttton once lightly. keyboard and mouse wouldn't wake it up

 

[dsh]

Glad I'm not the only one experiencing issues with the asrock ep2c602-4l/d16. Was going crazy trying to figure out why I was getting so many random NMI hardware failure BSODs in Windows 10 Pro. Sometimes would be stable for 3 days of heavy use, and sometimes would crash after being booted and idling for only 2 minutes.

Been rock solid since I rolled back to Windows 7 Enterprise.

Really hope they figure out whats going on .

Config:
asrock ep2c602-4l/d16
dual xeon 2670 SR0KX
32 GB ECC, fully tested
2 x 128gb SSD
Gigabyte Geforce 980 ti
1300w EVGA SuperNova PSU

Just an update. Installed windows 8.1 and still running solid. Definitely looks like a windows 10 specific issue as others have reported.

 

[wildpig1234]

that sucks ;(. I thought s2600cp was bad, but at least it's running win10 like a champ right now....aside from the incompatibility with Via usb 3.0 cards, everything else has been pretty good with win10...

 

[Bill1950]

But for DX12, and that provides a marginal improvement in gaming, I'm not sure I see any advantages of Windows 10 over Windows 7.

 

[wildpig1234]

But for DX12, and that provides a marginal improvement in gaming, I'm not sure I see any advantages of Windows 10 over Windows 7.

Mostly gaming. It's actually pretty impressive that win10 runs as well as it does on the s2600cp, something that's like made almost 6 yrs ago.